by Aiden Bates
Doug loved long, drawn-out and ugly cases.
He tried to devote enough time to those cases to justify the work he was doing for his father. That work was pro bono; he'd footed the bill for his father's initial defense himself.
He headed into the Woburn courthouse bright and early on the Tuesday after Columbus Day to start the trial. Doug had known Ann, the prosecutor, in law school. They were friendly, and they grabbed lunch together during the break. After court adjourned, he headed back to his office and worked until eight. He focused on prepping arguments and finding evidence in his other cases, with specific time allotted to each case, until he felt that he could justify turning to his father's case.
Then he selected another victim, supposedly of his father's. He looked up the date and the approximate time of the woman's death and he tried to put the woman herself out of his head. He couldn't afford to think about that right now. He had to focus on his father; he could worry about the victims later. Today he was focusing on the death of Orna McBride, forty-one, of Lakeville. She'd died on October 16, 2000, and her body had been only dismembered. Authorities agreed that the killer had probably been interrupted during disposal.
Where had Dad been on October 16? Well, he'd been with Doug, of course. And if he'd been with Doug, then he couldn't have been killing anyone. How to prove it, though? Had it been any kind of special occasion? Anything memorable at all about the day that would make it stick out in anyone's memory?
Doug had been in middle school in 2000. Mondays, in middle school, had been band nights. Doug never missed band. His father would have come to pick him up; in those days, Dad was always the one to pick him up. There just wasn't anyone else. He sent an email to Chris and to Ray, telling them to track down his band teacher, Mr. Rodach. Last Doug had heard Mr. Rodach had retired, but he should still be traceable to someone in the police department.
Ray called him back some five minutes later. "Are you still at work?" he asked.
"Well, yeah. I've got five cases other than Dad, so…" Doug smiled and closed his eyes. "It's good to hear your voice. I miss you."
"I miss you too." Ray's voice dropped. "I could come into Boston."
Doug bit his lip. "Isn't it kind of late?" He wanted Ray to say no. He wanted Ray to tell him that it wasn't late at all, and that he would be right there. Then he wanted him to abuse his police privileges and break every traffic law in the book to get to Doug's side.
"Probably." Ray sighed. "But I do miss you. Maybe we can agree to get together on Wednesday. Neither one of us will work late and we'll get together for dinner. We'll spend a little quality time together. Sound good?"
Doug would take it, even though it sounded perfectly awful to have to wait until the next day. "I suppose. You going to come down here and sweep me off my feet?"
Ray laughed. "I like you when you're off your feet, remember? I'll see you tomorrow, love."
The next day was like torture. Every minute spent in court was like torture, especially given that the prosecution's expert witness had a voice that was exactly like nails on a chalkboard. The pediatrician lectured about SIDS for two hours, helped on by Ann's questions. Doug knew that Ann was just as frustrated with this expert witness as Doug was, and he didn't feel all that bad about shredding the man on cross-examination.
And, thanks to the fact that he was in a foul mood, Doug did shred him. He pointed out that the "expert" was working from outdated information, exposing all of the areas in which he was deficient. He attacked the doctor's qualifications, and he attacked the expert's motivations. As he attacked, he could see members of the jury gasping and nodding. His tactics were working.
The next witness was the mother-in-law. The mother-in-law made an excellent witness up on the stand, showing a sad face about her grandson, but when Doug started to poke holes in her "loving grandmother" persona, her act didn't hold water. He revealed the contentious relationship she'd had with her daughter-in-law since the beginning. He brought up the mother-in-law's lack of interest in her grandchild, only visiting the baby once since his birth and not at all in the hospital. "This despite his early birth and long stay in the NICU. The reality is that you had no basis for accusing your daughter-in-law of killing her son. You simply don't like her, and wanted to free your son to marry someone more to your tastes."
"That's not true!" the older woman shouted. "Henry never should have married her, but he would have divorced her anyway once he figured out that she's just not our kind of people."
"You're the one who couldn't stand the sight of her own grandson. You insisted that they move to Boston, so that the mother would have no support network, and then you tried to destroy her." He turned his back on the mother to face the jury. "No further questions."
That night, Ray came by. They were trying to track down Mr. Rodach. So far, they'd figured out that he was up in Salem, New Hampshire. Hopefully they'd be able to go and talk to him sometime next week. In the meantime, they were still trying to chase down leads for some of the bodies they'd found in Freetown. "Oliver, our forensics guy, can't tell us much yet. What he can tell us is that the bodies aren't associated with the graves where they were left. They were buried too shallow, like the killer didn't care if animals got to them or something."
"Charming." Doug cuddled up to his alpha. "You know, I've seen some pretty depraved things through this job. My first murder case I went into the bathroom and threw up. This takes the cake. I want you to know that."
Ray laughed a little. "We all did. Except maybe Morris, you know? Ozzy? He came to the force from the Army, so he'd seen worse. But we all had to kind of strengthen our stomachs. This guy, though, he's pretty bad. We found five bodies in that graveyard that don't match the time frame of the cemetery. Assuming that they're all his, that means he's escalating."
"Ugh." Doug rubbed his face. "That's… I mean no matter which way you look at it, this is bad."
Ray stroked his face. "Hey. If he's using the same dump site, he's going to leave some trace evidence behind him, okay? That'll make it that much easier to nail him when we do find him."
They spent some time just lying together in the bed, enjoying one another's scent, and made an effort not to talk about work for a while. "Do you think there's a conflict of interest here?" Doug asked after a little while.
Ray went quiet for a long moment. "Under normal circumstances? Yeah, maybe. There isn't a damn thing about this case that's normal. I will have to ask you not to take on the new guy's defense, though. Just as a matter of professional courtesy."
Doug let out a little laugh. "I'm going to have to be careful not taking on clients whose cases you've worked on, going forward. I mean maybe, depending on how you want to work this. You might still want to back off after a little while, which is okay. I mean if that's what you want."
"It isn't." Ray ran his fingers through Doug's blond hair. "I don't want to be apart from you. I think once the case is over we should get a place together."
Doug looked into his alpha's eyes. "Do you mean it?"
"I've never been more serious." Ray kissed him. It wasn't a searing kiss, or a demanding kiss. It was a promise. "I don't think it's a good idea to add house hunting to our to-do list while we're hunting a serial killer. But I want to be public about our relationship. I want to go home to you. I want to be able to see you every night. I want to sleep next to you, and I don't think it's unreasonable."
Doug let out a delighted little laugh. "It's not unreasonable. We're mates." He burrowed into his alpha's arms. "I mean maybe we didn't go about it in the normal way, but we're mates and we love each other. We should live together. I want that for us."
The SIDS trial was much easier to face when he went to the courthouse the next day. They only had a few more witnesses to bring forward anyway. Doug worked long hours on Thursday and even on Friday, so that he could make the time to focus on Ray while he had him.
Ray came by on Friday night. There was sex, of course, because Doug thought he might explode i
f he didn't have it. Ray seemed to be having the same problem, and they had no reason not to indulge.
On Saturday and Sunday, when they could be roused from bed, they spent some time looking at real estate listings. They weren't being all that serious, not yet. They would get there eventually, but right now Doug wanted to get a sense for just how much compromise they would both have to make.
And they would both have to compromise. For Ray, even moving into Framingham for work had been a big deal. He'd grown up out on a commune in the western part of the state so that made a lot of sense. Doug had lived in New Haven and in Cambridge, so he'd had plenty of time to urbanize before settling in the South End. If they were going to find someplace that worked for both of them, they were going to have to go farther outside the city than Doug liked.
Although Doug wondered if he might be able to find another solution. "So," he began, "I'm not exactly keen on mowing lawns and that kind of crap, but if you're a fan we could probably get a place with some property, a little bit closer to the city. I'm thinking maybe Arlington, or Newton, or someplace like that. Someplace that still gives us both access to work, but allows us to have the open space you like. And allows me to get to businesses that go a little bit beyond Gino's Subs."
Ray laughed and nudged Doug with his shoulder. "Hey. Gino's Subs is a quality establishment!"
"Man cannot live on pepperoni alone, Ray." Doug rubbed at his flat stomach. "I'm telling you, I'm getting to an age where my stomach is getting to be a little too delicate for that kind of thing anymore. Newton's probably a little bit more convenient, but we could probably talk about one of these other places too if you wanted."
Ray looked at the list of homes, considering. Then he chuckled. "I guess lawyering pays better then detecting."
"Maybe." Doug blushed. Was Ray sensitive about that? Some guys could be. "I mean realistically, it's important to stay close enough to the city that I can still easily get into the office. Logically, I still need to be able to drive all over the state. You do too, right? I mean your office is in Framingham, but you could be on a crime scene in Lakeville one week and then all the way up in Ipswich the next."
"Who told you about that horror show up in Ipswich?" Ray shook his head. "Yeah, you're right. Newton makes more sense, if we can find someplace. We should keep it in mind."
Doug closed his eyes and let himself drift off to sleep. He'd never envisioned himself as a suburban kind of guy. He liked living in the city, but home was wherever Ray was. Home would always be where Ray was, once he got his father out of jail, and could think about things like that.
It couldn't come soon enough.
***
Another week went by, filled with more of the same. Crime scene crews spent the week down in Freetown, but no one blinked an eye. Oliver made no bones about his discomfort with the site, and how much he couldn't wait to get back to Framingham. "You hear things about that place," he confided, over the phone. "It's supposed to be haunted, you know. People say that there are monsters in there."
Ray shrugged. There might be literal monsters, he didn't know. There might be plain old human monsters. "I've always been open minded on the subject of the paranormal," he admitted. "I'm no expert. I don't go looking for information, but I don't disbelieve either. I'm not so arrogant as to think that I know everything there is to know about the world, or that the technology we have now can quantify it."
Oliver sighed. "Why do I get the feeling that there's a huge 'but' coming in here?"
Ray grinned. "But we know that the one who killed these women was human. He must have left some trace evidence."
Oliver groaned. "And the sooner I find it the sooner I can get back to my nice, clean lab. I know." Oliver hung up.
In the meantime, Robles got a long list of missing runaways, prostitutes, and addicts from the good folks at Abused Persons. Ray was able to speak directly with Ryan about the lists, because Ryan had just come back to work after giving birth to his and Robles' son. "Are there really this many people unaccounted for in the state?" Ray asked, shaking his head as he held up the long list.
"No. There are more." Ryan rubbed the back of his neck. "Most of them are probably fine. They left the area, or they went back to their families. The thing is, most of the women in this demographic, in your guy's age range, they're highly transient. That doesn't make what happens their fault, but it does make it harder for us to track them down when they do go off the grid." He looked at the list of names. "This one here. Irene Soto. She's been picked up for soliciting a few times at truck stops. I know her name because she was assaulted by a client four years ago. Worked her over good, too." He shook his head. "She couldn't stop doing what she did, though, because she had mouths to feed. She got stitched up, went out, and picked up a client that same night."
"Jesus." Ray passed a hand over his mouth.
"I also remember the name because she's got an open file for neglect. Which did seem odd at the time, but she had a habit of disappearing. She was last seen…" He woke his computer up from its slumber. "Sorry, man. Baby brain. I should be able to remember this stuff." He typed a few words into a database. "Right. She was last seen getting into a car, in a truck stop in Plainville. Detective Liz Best investigated, and found that there was nothing to indicate foul play. The car had been seen before, and the women always came back. So the case was chalked up to abandonment and the children were sent to live with relatives in Fall River." He glanced back at the screen. "It looks, for the record, like they're thriving."
"That's good to know, I guess. I mean she was so concerned about them." Ray slumped down. This was on him. If he'd picked up on the fact that there were two killers a little bit earlier, Irene Soto might be alive today.
Ryan seemed to be reading his mind. "Hey. There's no guarantee that Soto's one of the victims. Sometimes a woman in her situation just has to leave. Sometimes something else happens. We don't know, not yet, and you couldn't have stopped it. Okay?"
Ray nodded, and he walked off to put his nose a little bit closer to the grindstone.
Doug came out to Ray's house on Wednesday. He had a client at MCI-Framingham, so it just worked out best. At least that was what he said. Ray suspected that Doug was making sure that they didn't spend too much time at either home. He seemed to think of things like that a lot. Ray wasn't sure if that was a good thing or if it was a detriment yet. He liked that Doug wanted to make sure that neither one of them carried more of the travel burden for their relationship, though.
Doug hung his head when Ray told him about Soto. He wasn't buying the idea that she'd just taken off, either. "This is on me," he said. "If 'd just fought harder to stay on my dad's case, I'd have been able to prevent this."
"Maybe. Maybe not." Ray held him close. "I don't know that either of us could have prevented it. I mean there are still a lot of other factors that we need to look into. We're not just going to leave this here, you know?"
"I know." Doug closed his eyes and leaned into Ray's touch. "We're going to win this. We're going to put this son of a bitch behind bars."
"We will." Ray smiled and rubbed Doug's shoulders. "But not tonight."
Doug smiled. The tension evaporated from his body. "No, not tonight." He leaned forward and kissed Ray's mouth. What better way to affirm that they were, in fact, alive?
Ray cradled Doug's face in his hands as Doug made himself comfortable on his lap. The great thing about the claim was that they were able to learn one another so much better now. Their first encounter had been incredible, but it had also been driven in part by desperation. If Ray couldn't have gotten into Doug, he thought he might have combusted. Their coupling still had urgency to it, but they knew better how to turn one another on than they had before.
Doug liked it when Ray paid attention to his neck. It was one of the best, and the fastest, ways to take him from zero to sixty. He liked it when Ray kissed his neck. He'd almost purr when Ray nuzzled his neck. Even touching his neck, stroking it with his fingers, woul
d elicit the prettiest little sighs and moans. If Ray nibbled or licked along that long line of his throat, Doug would rock his hips just so, enough to urge him on.
Tonight, he kissed and licked, nibbled and sucked his way down Doug's throat and across his collarbone. Any marks that he accidentally left would be hidden by the tight collars and restrictive ties mandated by the court. No one would ever know.
Doug tilted his head to the side, baring his neck to Ray's mouth and hands. As he lost more of his clothing, his claim scar became more visible. If Ray hadn't already been hard, the sight of that visible reminder of their pairing would have been enough to get him going.
